By Kayhan Life Staff
The Iranian-born German director Niloufar Taghizadeh’s documentary “Googoosh: Made of Fire,” which premiered in cinemas in October 2024, is coming out on Apple TV this week to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement.
The documentary is the extraordinary story of the superstar Iranian singer and actress Googoosh, who rose to fame in the 1960s and ’70s, yet whose career was cruelly interrupted by the Revolution, when she was placed under house arrest for 21 years. Googoosh staged a comeback in North America in the 1990s, and since 2000, has been performing for adoring audiences all over the world.
“Humans carry a power within them,” says Googoosh in the documentary’s opening scenes. “A source of strength. We all have it, even if we don’t know it. We are not aware of it, somehow.”
“Googoosh: Made of Fire” tells the moving story of the Queen of Persian Pop, using rare archival footage, intimate interviews and the artist’s own personal reflections to trace her tumultuous life, her exile, and her triumphant return to the international stage in 2000.
“I had a stepmother who was…stereotypically evil,” Googoosh recalls in the documentary. “She made my brother and I suffer a lot. She often hit us. At home, she made us work like dogs. I had three jobs: Housekeeping and childcare at home, and my artistic work out in the world.”
“I tried to do my best at school,” she says. “But sadly, that was taken from me at an early age.” (Googoosh only completed elementary schooling, and was not allowed to attend secondary school.)
The only place where she felt safe and free was when she was performing. “The stage and acting in front of a camera were the real life for me. There, I felt alive. Away from the stage, I only survived,” she recalls.
Taghizadeh is a director, writer and producer who was born in Mashhad, Iran in 1978, “shortly before people’s lives were completely turned upside down,” she writes in the production notes.
Growing up in Mashhad, she listened to Googoosh’s songs and watched her films, often purchasing her cassettes from an illegal cassette dealer disguised as a toy dealer in the basement of a shopping center.
“While we children of the revolution had to be completely hooded and dressed in dark clothes and were not allowed to sing and were punished for one too many strands of hair, Googoosh brought a lot of color into our lives,” says Taghizadeh. “I could always escape into her music and movies and imagine an Iranian woman who had nothing to do with our everyday reality.”
Taghizadeh moved to Germany in 1996, where she studied film directing at the Atahnor Academy. In 2019, she founded her production company Windcatcher Productions, which would go on to produce “Nila’s Dream in the Garden of Eden” (2024) – a documentary about the unrecognized children of temporary marriages in Iran who live in a legal netherworld; and “Googoosh: Made of Fire.”
Googoosh is more than just a pop icon or a famous actress, according to Taghizadeh.
“She stands for the tireless pursuit of freedom and for the stifled voices of Iranian women. She continues to inspire people across generations not to give up, even where there is no hope. She has fought for what more than 80 million people want for their daughters and themselves: a free, loud voice. ‘Googoosh: Made of Fire’ is my attempt to show her story and, in parallel, the history of Iranian culture over the last 45 years,” notes Taghizadeh.
The documentary ends with Taghizadeh asking Googoosh what message she could give to women and men in any country “who don’t have any hope and feel trapped in a dead end.”
Googoosh replies that she has no particular message, because she finds herself caught in a continual storm, and everything that happens, be it good or bad, is a new experience.
“I accepted it happily and I still do and I don’t run away, because all of it shaped me and keeps on shaping me,” she says.
“My hope is, that one day, freedom and joy will return to my homeland.”
